Dan Vyleta - Smoke

“We know that she’s been here. The door was open and her footprint was outside. And Sebastian’s letter spoke of construction works. Down here, in the basement. There must be a doorway, then, a passage; something to connect one of these rooms to the sewers. But I looked at all the walls and can’t see evidence of any construction.” He mutters to himself, walks another thirty yards in four-step paces. “Let’s think it out. Only quick now, quick. What do we know? She has been collecting Soot. Black Soot, the darkest she can find, has scraped it off murderers, spent millions to build this sewer to get more. Well then, for what purpose? To quicken it, you say. No, not just quicken it but make it explosive. Self-perpetuating. Contagious. And not by the usual method, using the solvent produced in this factory, which is weak and does not last, but with Mowgli’s blood, two thousand two hundred cubic centimetres — four pints! — of his blood. Do I have this right? Yes? All right! The sewers will steam with rage. A black cloud like nothing anyone has seen, rising out of the ground and infecting the city. But then what? I don’t understand.”

“He kept talking about the French Revolution,” Livia answers. “Robespierre. Decimal time. The Terror.”

Charlie stops mid-step. It nearly costs him his balance.

“Is that what she’s planning? An uprising! An age of anger. Nobody working, the factories idle, the docks closed. An army of Juliuses, infecting one another, looking for food beyond the city. Marching on the manor houses.” He stands, head cocked, appalled and baffled. “But why would your mother want such a thing?”

“She’s evil.”

Charlie won’t have it. “Even evil needs reasons,” he says. “You don’t destroy the world just so .”

“Mad, then. Mother’s gone mad. Just like Father. She hates Discipline. It broke him. She thinks she’s avenging him.”

“Mad?” says Charlie. “I don’t know. When is the last time you saw your mother smoke?”

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They sit perplexed and passive, minutes trickling away. Thomas is aware that both Livia and Charlie are looking at him, waiting for him.

Lead us , these looks appear to say. You always have.

But Thomas is afraid to lead.

It is a weak sort of fear, cowering and smokeless, at a remove from life. His shoulders rounded, his chin tucked in Grendel’s abject stoop. The respirator remains spread out on the table in front of him, built to filter Smoke from the infectious air and wall in its wearer within the safety of his private self. Thomas is conscious of Livia watching him as he turns the mask within his hands; once, twice; disappointment cleaving her face. Then she bends to him, leans into him, lip to lip, and shouts her anger into his face—“Help us, God damn you!”—each word a sulphurous taunt summoning his manhood, in that strange language of Smoke in which love and derision can be as one.

It is enough and not enough; sends him to his feet and away from the table, half in obedience to her call to arms, half in flight from her challenge. Like Charlie before him, he storms around the room housing the fermentation vats. It is not the walls he inspects but the floors; and seeing nothing, no fresh seams nor any irregularities in the dark tiling, his courage already abating, he grabs a wrench from a toolbox in one corner, and systematically, hurting his wrist and damaged hand, hammers away at a copper pipe emerging from one of the hulking vats like a spout, until it gives way and a sickly floral liquid pours in a thousand gallons across the floor. Then he stands, watching the room fill inch-deep with flowers and liquid, eyes peeled, head cocked, like a man on the hunt.

“Why did you—” Charlie begins but Thomas hushes him, hears then sees the pop of bubbles in one corner, where the liquid is drawn to some flaw within the flooring and is rushing to a pocket of air trapped underneath. As the liquid’s level slowly begins to fall, the flowers floating within it arrange themselves into a rough and soggy square, marking the outline of a well-masked trapdoor underneath their feet.

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They have to wait until the weight of the liquid has shifted from the door, then kick aside the pulpy mass of drenched and half-fermented flowers. The trapdoor itself has a tiny keyhole and is locked. This time it is Charlie who acts: he fetches a giant steel ladle from the same box of tools that supplied the wrench, manages to wedge it into the minute gap between trapdoor and floor, and throws his weight against it. Soon Thomas too is pushing at this lever. Together, they break the lock and bend the ladle, open the trapdoor to a rough-hewn wooden staircase leading down.

They descend. The staircase is new, wet and strewn with dead flowers; the air rising out of the stairwell thick with the smells of excrement and offal. At the bottom, a light burns. They walk towards it and come to a landing and an arched gateway, much older than the stairs. Beyond lie the sewers: a dark canal of stagnant water, flanked by slime-spattered walkways on each side. But their eyes are riveted elsewhere. Dangling from the ceiling, suspended by a rubber string, hangs a bulb of murky, unwavering light. No flame flickers within. It is like an ailing, miniature sun, fetched down from the sky and nailed here by a hangman. When Thomas touches it, it burns his fingertip, then quivers and dances like a hooked fish.

“How will we ever stop her?” Charlie whispers, faced with this new magic.

Livia’s answer is curt. “We must try.”

Thomas is aware of a mixture of shame and relief when he sees her take the lead; of a flare of timid anger when she reaches back and takes hold of Charlie’s hand. Charlie, in turn, stretches his free palm behind himself, looking for his friend’s. Thomas ignores the gesture.

He follows warily, at two steps’ remove.

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It isn’t far. A hundred yards of sewer, thrice stripped of its murk by a bulb holding the same mysterious, unflickering light; then an archway opens to a room so long it too feels like a corridor, though it measures a good ten yards in width. The room is built from dark brick, ancient and porous, the mortar worn like a petrified sponge. The ceiling is low above their heads and supported by steel girders, much newer than the brick. A garland of lamps, interconnected by a black line of rubber cable, marks the central axis, from the archway through which they enter, to the far end, hundreds of feet ahead. Beneath these lamps, filling three quarters of the room and only leaving a narrow strip of walking space at either side, lies a series of interconnected pools, tiled in shiny, almost fluorescent green. Each pool is separated from the next by a permeable membrane made of some waxy cloth. Only the top foot of the tiles is visible. The water that stands heavy in the pools beneath is mirror-dark. It is as though a communal baths has been pumped full of ink. All this Thomas sees in passing, following his friends on the long march to the other end. Lady Naylor is there; and Grendel; and Mowgli, tied with belts to a heavy wooden chair.

She notices them within ten steps. There is no cover, just the open narrow passage between wall and poolside. They are walking slowly on the wet, uneven ground, sunk and cracked in places, smeared with sewage muck. Thomas sees Lady Naylor squint; sees her hand flicker for something, raise it up before her chest, then drop it to her lap upon recognition. Each step reveals a new detail. Lady Naylor has made herself cozy amongst the dirt; she is sitting in an armchair, a wineglass and a bottle on a coffee table by her side. It’s a wonder she has not brought her slippers. By her other elbow, a worktable, made presentable by means of a starched tablecloth and laden with various instruments. The dark shape of her Soot bottle rises amongst them. At the other end of the table, Grendel stoops over the boy, assiduously wiping his brow. Halfway across the length of the room, Thomas begins to make out Mowgli’s face, sweaty and feverish, and the spasmodic shivers that pit his little body against the restraints. He thinks of Renfrew’s dentist chair; of Renfrew’s niece as described by Charlie; and wonders darkly whether there exists a world in which children are not bent to purpose by a strap. Something — a needle? — grows like a mechanical tumour out of the boy’s naked flank, at the height of the liver. Grendel is fussing with it: solicitous, chin curled into chest, as though bowing to the child.